Islam: growing your own

I have always thought that we in the West, in Europe, the UK, in London, will have to grow our own form of Islam.

In the past, I described Islam in the west as a green shoot which would be crushed if we tried to impose on it the full weight of a mature Islamic culture (see my ‘Establishing Islam in Post-modernity; Norwich, 1987).

This idea is difficult to understand for people who see Islam as a theoretical abstract or universal form, immutable and unchangeable.

However, ‘growing our own form of Islam’ is not an option, it is a historical necessity which cannot be avoided because this is how reality works. Very often we seem to have an idea about phenomena based on abstractions, a theoretical view, and are peculiarly blind to the act that the world is not really like this. Hold up a coin and ask someone what shape it is. They will usually say it is round; but only if the coin is held at a very specific angle will it look exactly round, so the reply was based on an abstract idea rather than an actual sense impression.

If you look around on the street in London today you will see English Islam growing. But it is growing in an informal, uncontrolled and haphazardly chaotic way. This is not wrong, it is natural. However, Islam is a human phenomenon and subject to conscious control and we can think about how to facilitate and guide the growth of this new Islam.

In this complex, chaotic, natural growth, there will be multiple influences and cross-currents: I do not see it as a linear process. Some elements of the flow will hold the opinion that Islam is an abstract and immutable system of rules of thought and behaviour which must be imposed on, firstly, oneself, secondly, one’s family and friends and, thirdly, the rest of the world. There is no arguing with this position.

There is no arguing with this position for the same reason there is no arguing with atheists – they do not submit to what we submit to.

‘Submission’, in this sense, is to accept without further argument foundational axioms of thinking. The atheist and the Islamist have submitted to a socially constructed system of thought, an ‘-ism’, which obscures a more authentic mode of being-in-the-world by overlaying it with subjective interpretations (inventions) masquerading as objective perceptions (discoveries).

This is a thoroughly confusing and false dialectic – wahm may be a good word for it.

It is tempting to say that there are no objective perceptions, only interpretations: even on the level of ‘sense data’ this would hold true – light and sound have to be interpreted to make sense; seeing and hearing are mental, not physical, events.

Notice, though, that if everything is ‘interpretation’ then there is no longer any sense to its opposite: if all phenomena in our experience are ‘subjective’, then ‘objective’ becomes meaningless. Not only that, but ‘subjective’ ‘interpretation’ also simultaneously loses its meaning.

Neither does it seem possible to retain some kind of scale of judgment ranging from more subjective to more objective, appealing though this may seem. For example, dreams could be held to be almost purely subjective, existing only in the awareness of the dreamer; but there is still a sense in which there is an experiencing subject and there are objects of experience, there is still ‘intentionality’ in phenomenological terminology.

On the other hand, what could a purely objective phenomenon be? What is the sound made by a tree falling unobserved in the forest?- as one ur-phenomenologist once inquired.

Why burden ourselves with a nomenclature which relies on two mutually defining yet senseless, i.e. non-denoting, abstract concepts?

If it is neither true that ‘everything is interpretation’ nor that we are capable of perceiving and talking and thinking about ‘objective reality’, can we find another way of thinking about Being? And how would this lead us to thinking about Islam?